There are three ways to contribute to scientific progress. The direct way is to conduct a good scientific study and publish the results. The indirect way is to help others make a direct contribution. Journal editors, university administrators and philanthropists who fund research contribute to scientific progress in this second way. A third approach is to marry the first two and make a scientific advance that itself expedites scientific advances. The full significance of this third way is commonly overlooked.

It is, of course, widely appreciated that certain academic contributions lay the theoretical or empirical foundations for further work. One reason why a great scientist such as Einstein is celebrated is that his discoveries have enabled thousands of other scientists to tackle problems that they could not have solved without relativity theory.

Yet even this deep and beautiful theory is, in one sense, very narrow. While relativity is of great help in cosmology and some other parts of physics, it is of little use to a geneticist, a palaeontologist, or a neuroscientist. General relativity theory is therefore a significant but not a vast contribution to the scientific enterprise as a whole.

Some findings have wider applicability. The scientific method itself the idea of creating hypotheses and subjecting them to string entempirical tests is one such. Many of the basic results in statistics also have very wide applicability. And some scientific instruments, such as the thermometer, the microscope, and the computer, have proved enormously useful over a wide range of domains. Institutional innovations such as the peer-reviewed journal should also be counted.

Those who seek the advancement of human knowledge should focus more on these kinds of indirect contribution. A "superficial" contribution that facilitates work across a wide range of domains can be worth much more than a relatively "profound" contribution to one narrow field, just as a lake can contain a lot more water than a well, even if the well Is deeper.